Carnival of Space #339

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Sunday, February 2, 2014

Carnival of Space #339

Hi all and welcome aboard the 339th edition of Carnival of Space. We will start this edition by honoring the 17 astronauts who have given their life to the American space program. On January 271967 during a training for the first Apollo mission, less than a month before the planned launch, a fire in the crew cabin took the life of Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward
H. White and Roger B. Chaffee. The challenger disaster occurred on January 281986 just 73 seconds after launch, taking the lives of Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Greg Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. On February 1 2003 the Columbia disaster at the end of STS-107 mission, and in which Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel Clark and the Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon died.
Dedicate a few moments in memory of these men and women in the official NASA day of remembrance page.

Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia Astronauts. Credit: NASA

Back again to this week articles. We will start with our closest neighbor, the moon.Dr. Paul Spudis shares his memories and knowledge as one of the investigators and researchers in Clementine missions. A comprehensive article about the mission can be found in Dr Spudis's blog. A summarized version can be found in Air&Space magazine.

The next item from CosmoQuest shows that even spaceships, orbiters, landers and such like to have some company from time to time. Read about the latest spacecraft imaging another spacecraft, LRO take a snap of LADEE.

The Synergy principal is true everywhere and also in space - three are better than one. The Urban Astronomer tells us about the Frontier Fields program - an ambitious attempt to combine the power
of NASA's three flagship space telescopes (Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer)
to peer deeper into the universe than ever before and learn about the
structure of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.